“Poor fellow!” said the astonished Bondy, full of sympathy. “And did he die of it?”
“No, but he got converted,” cried Marek in despair. “Bondy, you’re a man I can confide in. My invention, my Karburator, has one terrible defect. Nevertheless, you’re going to buy it or else take it from me as a gift. You will, Bondy—even if it spews forth demons. It doesn’t matter to you, Bondy, so long as you can get your millions out of it. And you’ll get them, man. It’s a stupendous thing, I tell you—; but I don’t want to have anything more to do with it. You haven’t such a sensitive conscience as I have, you know, Bondy. It’ll bring in millions, thousands of millions; but it will lay a frightful load upon your conscience. Make up your mind!”
“Oh, leave me alone,” Mr. Bondy protested. “If it gives off poisonous gases, the authorities will prohibit it, and there’s an end of it. You know the wretched state of affairs here. Now in America …”
“It isn’t poisonous gases,” Marek exclaimed. “It’s something a thousand times worse. Mark what I tell you, Bondy, it’s something beyond human reason, but there’s not a scrap of deception about it. Well, then, my Karburator actually does burn up matter, causes its utter combustion, so that not even a grain of dust remains. Or rather, it breaks it up, crushes it, splits it up into electrons, consumes it, grinds it—I don’t know how to express it—in short, uses it up completely. You have no idea what a colossal amount of energy is contained in the atoms. With half a hundredweight of coal in the Karburator you can sail right round the world in a steamship, you can light the whole city of Prague, you can supply power for the whole of a huge factory, or anything you like. A bit of coal the size of a nut will do the heating and the cooking for a whole family. And ultimately we shan’t even require coal; we can do our heating with the first pebble or handful of dirt we pick up in front of the house. Every scrap of matter has in it more energy than an enormous boiler; you’ve only to extract it. You’ve only to know how to secure total combustion! Well, Bondy, I can do it; my Karburator can do it. You’ll admit, Bondy, that it has been worth while toiling over it for twenty years.”
“Look here, Rudy,” Bondy began slowly, “it’s all very extraordinary—but I believe you, so to speak. On my soul, I do believe you. You know, when I stood in front of that Karburator of yours, I felt that I was in the presence of something overpoweringly great, something a man could not withstand. I can’t help it: I believe you. Down there in the cellar you have something uncanny, something that will overturn the whole world.”
“Alas, Bondy,” Marek whispered anxiously, “that’s just where the trouble is. Listen, and I’ll tell you the whole thing. Have you ever read Spinoza?”
“No.”
“No more had I. But now, you see, I’m beginning to read that sort of thing. I don’t understand it—it’s terribly difficult stuff for us technical people—but there’s something in it. Do you by any chance believe in God?”
“I? Well, now …” G. H. Bondy deliberated. “Upon my word, I couldn’t say. Perhaps there is a God, but He’s on some other planet. Not on ours. Oh, well, that sort of thing doesn’t fit in with our times at all. Tell me, what makes you drag that into it?”
“I don’t believe in anything,” said Marek in a hard voice. “I don’t want to believe. I have always been an atheist. I believed in matter and in progress and in nothing else. I’m a scientific man, Bondy; and science cannot admit the existence of God.”
“From the business point of view,” Mr. Bondy remarked, “it’s a matter of indifference. If He wants to exist, in Heaven’s name, let Him. We aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“But from the scientific point of view, Bondy,” cried the engineer sternly, “it is absolutely intolerable. It’s a case of Him or science. I don’t assert that God does not exist; I only assert that He ought not to exist, or at least ought not to let Himself be seen. And I believe that science is crowding Him out step by step, or at any rate is preventing Him from letting Himself be seen; and I believe that that is the greatest mission of science.”
“Possibly,” said Bondy calmly. “But go on.”
“And now just imagine, Bondy, that—But wait, I’ll put it to you this way. Do you know what Pantheism is? It’s the belief that God, or the Absolute, if you prefer it, is manifest in everything that exists. In men, as in stones, in the grass, the water—everywhere. And do you know what Spinoza teaches? That matter is only the outward manifestation, only one phase of the divine substance, the other phase of which is spirit. And do you know what Fechner teaches?”
“No, I don’t,” the other admitted.
“Fechner teaches that everything, everything that is, is penetrated with the divine, that God fills with His being the whole of the matter in the world. And do you know Leibniz? Leibniz teaches that physical matter is composed of psychical atoms, monads, whose nature is divine. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know,” said G. H. Bondy. “I don’t understand it.”
“Nor do I. It’s fearfully abstruse. But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that God is contained in all forms of physical matter, that He is, as it were, imprisoned in it. And when you smash this matter up completely, He flies out of it as though from a box. He is suddenly
